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Math Is Erotic - First Things

The most shining moment of my education as a physics major at UC Santa Barbara came in the final lecture of an upper-division course on electricity and magnetism. We had learned...

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Hasnain says:

Unfortunately the title was more promising than the actual content here

“The function universities have long played is less one of educating than of credentialing. Carter gives us good reason to think the credentialing function of universities is about to collapse, due to AI. But he finds new possibilities, or rather old possibilities, emerging from the wreckage: liberal education in the original sense, as a leisure activity (“scholar” is from schole, leisure) for its own sake; for the love of truth. Unburdened of its current gatekeeping role in the political economy of managerialism and bullshit jobs, and no longer serving as a legitimation operation for unpopular political projects (producing “the Science” that must be “followed”), the successor to the modern university will be something subterranean rather than publicity-seeking, disconnected from power and money, useless, a place where people with the most searching minds gather to pursue truth for the love of it, as literal amateurs.

Posted on 2025-07-28T00:14:01+0000